by Philip Kerr
The inhabitants of Posen, formerly known as Poznań, had endured the SS in their city since September 1939, but no one on the tram could remember ever seeing so many SS at the Königliches Residenzschloss; it was almost as if the SS were holding some sort of rally at the castle. If the people on the tram had dared to look more closely, they would have noticed that every one of the SS officers arriving at the castle that morning was a general.
One such general was a handsome, dapper-looking man of medium height in his early thirties. Unlike most of his brother senior officers, this particular SS general stopped for a moment to smoke a cigarette and look with a critical eye at the exterior of the castle, with its ignoble, suburban clock tower and high mansard roof from which were hung a number of long swastika banners. Then, looking one last time across Adam Mickiewicz Square, he ground the cigarette under the heel of his well-polished boot and went inside.
The general was Walter Schellenberg, and he was no stranger to Posen. His second wife, Irene, had come from Posen, something he had discovered not from her but from his then boss and the former chief of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich. Six months after marrying Irene, in May 1940, Schellenberg had been given a file by Heydrich. It revealed that Irene’s aunt was married to a Jew. Heydrich’s meaning had been clear enough: Schellenberg now belonged to Heydrich, at least as long as he cared anything about his wife’s relations. But two years later Heydrich was dead, murdered by Czech partisans, and Department 6 (Amt VI) of the foreign intelligence section of the Reich Security Office, one of the key administrations formerly commanded by Heydrich, was given to Schellenberg.
In the castle’s Golden Hall there were perhaps only two notable absentees: Heydrich’s replacement as chief of the Reich Security Office (which included the SD and the Gestapo), Ernst Kaltenbrunner; and Himmler’s former adjutant, Karl Wolff, now the supreme SS representative in Italy. It had been given out that both men were too ill to attend Himmler’s conference in Posen, that Kaltenbrunner was suffering from phlebitis and Wolff was recovering from an operation to remove a kidney stone. But Schellenberg, a man as well informed as he was resourceful, knew the truth. On Himmler’s orders Kaltenbrunner, an alcoholic, was drying out in a Swiss sanatorium, while Wolff and his former boss were no longer on speaking terms after the Reichsführer-SS had refused Wolff permission to divorce his wife, Frieda, in order to marry a tasty blonde named Grafin—a permission subsequently granted by Hitler himself when (quite unforgivably, in Himmler’s eyes) Wolff went over Himmler’s head.
There was, Schellenberg thought to himself as he sauntered into the hall, never a dull moment in the SS. Well, almost never. A speech by Himmler was not something he could view with anything other than dread, for the Reichsführer had a tendency to longwindedness, and given the number of SS generals who were gathered in architect Franz Schwechten’s Golden Hall, Schellenberg expected a speech of Mahabharatan length and dullness. The Mahabharata was a book the young general had made himself read so that he might better understand Heinrich Himmler, who was its most passionate advocate; and having read it, Schellenberg had certainly found it easier to see where Himmler got some of his crazier ideas concerning duty, discipline, and, a favorite Himmler word, sacrifice. And Schellenberg did not think it too fanciful to view Himmler as someone who regarded himself as an avatar of the supreme god, Vishnu—or, at the very least, his high priest, descended to earth in human form to rescue Law, Good Deeds, Right, and Virtue. Schellenberg had also formed the impression that Himmler thought of Jews in the same way that the Mahabharata spoke of the one hundred Dhartarashtras—the grotesque human incarnations of demons who were the perpetual enemies of the gods. For all Schellenberg knew, Hitler held the same opinion, although he thought it much more likely that the Führer simply hated Jews, which wasn’t exactly unusual in Germany and Austria. Schellenberg himself had nothing at all against the Jews; his own father had been a piano manufacturer in Saarbrücken and then in Luxembourg, and many of his best customers had been Jews. So it was fortunate that Schellenberg’s own department was obliged to pay little more than lip service to all the usual Aryanist claptrap about Jewish subhumans and vermin. Those anti-Semites who did work in Amt VI—and there were quite a few—knew better than to give vent to their hatred in the presence of Walter Schellenberg. The young Foreign Intelligence head was interested only in what a British secret agent, Captain Arthur Connolly, had once called “the Great Game”—the game in question being espionage, intrigue, and clandestine military adventure.
Schellenberg helped himself to coffee from an enormous refectory table, and, his eyes hardly noticing the enormous portrait of the Führer hanging underneath one of three enormous arched windows, he fixed a smile on his clever schoolboy’s face and meandered toward a pair of officers he recognized.
Arthur Nebe, head of the Criminal Police, was a man much admired by Schellenberg. He hoped he might get a chance to warn Nebe of a whispered rumor making the rounds in Berlin. In 1941, according to the gossips, Nebe, in command of a Special Action Group in occupied Russia, had not only falsified his report of the slaughter of thousands of Jews, but also had allowed many to escape.
No such rumors attended the record of the second officer, Otto Ohlendorf, now chief of the SD’s Domestic Intelligence Department and responsible for, among other things, compiling reports regarding German public opinion. The Einsatzgruppe commanded by Ohlendorf in the Crimea had been regarded as one of the most successful, slaughtering more than a hundred thousand Jews.
“So here he is,” said Nebe, “our youngest brother, Benjamin.” Nebe was repeating a remark made by Himmler about Schellenberg being the youngest general in the SS.
“I expect to grow older and wiser this morning,” said Schellenberg.
“I can guarantee you’ll grow older,” said Ohlendorf. “Last time I went to one of these affairs it was in Wewelsburg. I think Himmler got all of it straight out of a Richard Wagner libretto. ‘Never forget we are a knightly order from which one cannot withdraw and to which one is recruited by blood.’ Or words to that effect.” Ohlendorf shook his head, wearily. “Anyway, it was all very inspiring. And long. Very, very long. Like a rather slow performance of Parsifal.”
“It wasn’t blood that got me into this knightly order,” said Nebe. “But that’s certainly been the end result.”
“All that ‘knightly’ order stuff makes me sick,” said Ohlendorf. “Dreamed up by that lunatic Hildebrandt.” He nodded at another SS-Gruppenführer who was engaged in earnest-looking conversation with Oswald Pohl. Hildebrandt’s own department, the Race and Resettlement Office, was subordinate to the Administration Office of the SS, of which Pohl was the head. “My God, I detest that bastard.”
“Me, too,” murmured Nebe.
“Doesn’t everyone?” remarked Schellenberg, who had an extra reason to hate and fear Hildebrandt: one of Hildebrandt’s principal functions was to investigate the racial purity of SS men’s families. Schellenberg lived with the fear that just such an investigation might discover that there was more than one Jew in his family.
“There’s Müller,” said Ohlendorf. “I had better go and make my peace with him and the Gestapo.” And putting down his coffee cup, he went to speak to the diminutive Gestapo chief, leaving Nebe and Schellenberg to their own conversation.
Nebe was a small, tough-looking man with gray, almost silver hair, a thin slit of a mouth, and a policeman’s inquiring nose. He spoke in a thick Berlin accent.
“Listen carefully,” said Nebe. “Don’t ask questions, just listen. I know what I know because I used to be in the Gestapo, when Diels was still in charge. And I still have a few friends there who tell me things. Such as the fact that the Gestapo have you under surveillance. No, don’t ask me why because I don’t know. Here—” Nebe took out a cigarette case shaped like a coffin and opened it to reveal the little flat cigarettes he smoked. “Have a nail.”
“And here I was thinking that I might have to warn you about something.”
“L
ike what, for instance?”
“There’s a rumor going around the SD that you falsified the figures for your Einsatzgruppe in Byelorussia.”
“Everyone did,” said Nebe. “What of it?”
“But for different reasons. It’s said that you actually tried to put a brake on the slaughter.”
“What can you do about such slanders? Himmler himself inspected my theater of operations, in Minsk. So, as you can see, accusing me of going easy on some Russian Jews is the same thing as saying that Himmler wasn’t clever enough to spot anything wrong. And we can’t have that, can we?” Nebe smiled coolly and lit their cigarettes. “No, I’m in the clear about that one, old boy, whatever the rumors say. But thanks. I appreciate it.” He sucked hard at his cigarette and nodded warmly at Schellenberg.
Schellenberg’s mind was already racing out of the castle and back to his hometown of Saarbrücken. Not long before he died, Heydrich had given Schellenberg the file about his wife’s Jewish uncle. But had Heydrich kept a copy that was now in the possession of the Gestapo? And was it possible that the Gestapo might now suspect that he himself was Jewish? Berg was a German surname, but it could hardly be denied that there were more than a few Jews who had used the name as a prefix or suffix in an attempt to Germanize their own Hebraic names. Could that be what they were out to prove? To destroy him with the insinuation that he himself was Jewish? After all, the Gestapo had tried to destroy Heydrich with the suggestion that the “blond Moses” was also a Jew. Except that, in Heydrich’s case, this was a suggestion that turned out to be partly true.
After Heydrich’s murder, Himmler had shown Schellenberg a file that proved Heydrich’s father, Bruno, a piano teacher from Halle, had been Jewish. (His nickname in Halle had been Isidor Suess.) Schellenberg had thought it was a strange thing for Himmler to have done so soon after Heydrich’s death until he realized that this was the Reichsführer’s way of persuading Schellenberg that he should forget about his former boss, that his loyalty now lay with the Reichsführer himself. But with Schellenberg’s own father, a piano maker, Schellenberg did not think it so very far-fetched that someone in the Gestapo, jealous of his precocious success—at thirty-three he was the youngest general in the SS—should have considered it worth the Gestapo’s time to investigate the possibility of his being Jewish, too.
He was about to ask Nebe a question, but the Berliner was already shaking his head and looking over Schellenberg’s shoulder. And as soon as Schellenberg turned, he saw a heavyset man with a bull neck and a shaven head who greeted him like an old friend.
“My dear friend,” he said. “How nice to see you. I wanted to ask if there was any news about Kaltenbrunner.”
“He’s ill,” said Schellenberg.
“Yes, yes, but what is it that ails him? What is this illness he has?”
“The doctors say it’s phlebitis.”
“Phlebitis? And what’s that when it’s not in a medical dictionary?”
“Inflammation of the veins,” said Schellenberg, who was anxious to get away from the man, hating the familiarity with which Richard Gluecks had spoken to him. Schellenberg had only ever met him once before, but it was not a day he was likely to forget.
Richard Gluecks was in charge of the concentration camps. Not long after his appointment as chief of the SD, Kaltenbrunner had insisted on taking Schellenberg to see a special camp. Schellenberg looked into Gluecks’s florid face as the man began to speculate on what might have caused Kaltenbrunner’s illness and remembered that dreadful day in Mauthausen in all too vivid detail: the ferocious dogs, the smell of burning corpses, the unhinged cruelty of the officers, the absolute freedom of the swaggering guards to maim or kill, the distant gunshots, and the stench of the prisoners’ barracks. The whole camp had been an insane laboratory of malice and violence. But the thing that Schellenberg remembered most vividly of all had been the drunkenness. Everyone on that tour of the special camp, himself included, had been drunk. Being drunk made things easier, of course. Easier not to care. Easier to torture someone or kill them. Easier to conduct hideous medical experiments on prisoners. Easier to force a thin smile onto your face and compliment your brother SS officers on a job well done. Small wonder that Kaltenbrunner was an alcoholic. Schellenberg told himself that if he had had to visit a special camp more than once, by now he would have killed himself with drink. The only wonder was that not every SS man serving in the special camps was addicted in the same way as Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
“I’m not in Berlin very much,” said Gluecks. “My work keeps me in the East, of course. So if you see him, please tell Ernst I was asking for him.”
“Yes, I will.” With relief Schellenberg turned away from Gluecks, only to find himself face-to-face with a man he regarded with no less loathing: Joachim von Ribbentrop. Since he knew that the foreign minister was well aware of Schellenberg’s pivotal role in the attempt of his former aide, Martin Luther, to discredit him with the Reichsführer-SS, Schellenberg expected to be cold-shouldered. Instead, much to the intelligence chief’s surprise, the foreign minister actually spoke to him.
“Ah, yes, Schellenberg, there you are. I hoped to have a chance to talk to you.”
“Yes, Herr Reichsminister?”
“I’ve been speaking to that fellow of yours, Ludwig Moyzisch. About Agent Cicero and the supposed contents of the British ambassador’s safe in Ankara. I’m surprised to hear that you think Cicero’s material is genuine. You see, I know the British very well. Better than you, I think. I’ve even met their ambassador to Turkey, Sir Hughe, and I know the kind of man he is. Not a complete fool, you know. I mean he only had to run a background check on this fellow—Bazna, isn’t it? Cicero’s real name? All he had to do was ask one or two questions to have discovered that one of Bazna’s former employers in Ankara was my own brother-in-law, Alfred. Shall I tell you what I think, Schellenberg?”
“Please, Herr Reichsminister. I should be pleased to hear your opinion.”
“I think Sir Hughe did ask; and having discovered that he had been Alfred’s employee, they decided to put some information his way. False information. For our benefit. Take my word for it. This is the Big Three we’re talking about. You don’t just stumble across top-secret information about when and where they are meeting. If you ask me, this Cicero is a complete charlatan. But speak to my brother-in-law yourself, if you like. He’ll confirm what I say.”
Schellenberg nodded. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said. “But I did speak to our own former ambassador to Persia. At length. He tells me that Sir Hughe was British ambassador there from ’34 to ’36, and that Sir Hughe has never been particularly careful about security. Even then, he was, apparently, often in the habit of taking sensitive documents home with him. You see, the Abwehr tried to steal them as long ago as 1935. As a matter of fact, they have quite a large file on Sir Hughe relating to his time in Teheran. ‘Snatch,’ as he is better known to those who were at Balliol with Sir Hughe, is privately considered by no less a figure than your opposite number in England, Sir Anthony Eden, to be leakier than a sieve. And none too intelligent, either. The Ankara posting was seen as a means of keeping him safely out of harm’s way. At least, it was until the outbreak of war, when the small matter of Turkish neutrality came up. In short, everything I have learned in assessing the intelligence from Cicero has led me to suppose that Sir Hughe was too lazy and trusting to make thorough enquiries about Bazna. Indeed it seems that he was much more concerned with hiring a good servant than with vetting a potential security risk. And with all due respect, Herr Reichsminister, I think you are mistaken in judging him by your own highly efficient standards.”
“What an imagination you have, Schellenberg. But then I suppose that is your job. Well, good luck to you. Only don’t say I didn’t warn you.” With that von Ribbentrop turned on his heel and walked off in the opposite direction, finally coming to a halt next to Generals Frank, Lörner, and Kammler.
Schellenberg lit a cigarette and continued
to watch von Ribbentrop. It was interesting, he thought, that the foreign minister should have been prepared to overcome his loathing of him long enough to try to discredit Bazna and suggest his material was of no value. Which seemed to indicate that von Ribbentrop held quite the opposite opinion and was trying to prevent Amt VI from acting on Cicero’s intelligence. Schellenberg had formed no particular plans in this matter, but given von Ribbentrop’s interest in the affair, he began to wonder if he should try to think of one, if only to irritate the most pompous minister in the Reich.
“Can’t you do without a cigarette in your mouth for just five minutes?”
It was Himmler, pointing at the Golden Hall’s magnificent Neo-Romanesque ceiling, where a thin cloud of smoke was already gathering above the heads of the SS troop leaders. “Look at the air in here,” he said irritably. “I don’t mind the odd cigar in the evening, but first thing in the morning?”
Schellenberg was relieved to see that Himmler’s antismoking remarks were addressed not just to him but also to several other officers who were smoking. He looked around for an ashtray.
“I don’t mind you killing yourself with nicotine, but I do object to your poisoning me with it. If my throat doesn’t hold up through the next three and a half hours, I shall hold all of you responsible.”
Himmler marched off to the podium, his boots knocking loudly on the polished wooden floor, leaving Schellenberg to finish his cigarette in peace and to reflect upon the imminent prospect of a three-and-a-half-hour speech from the Reichsführer-SS. Three and a half hours was 210 minutes, and for that you needed something a lot stronger than a cup of coffee and a cigarette.